Full Transcript:

Benjamin Higginbotham: Benjamin Higginbotham with technologyevangelist.com, in the world podcasting headquarters of TE in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That title changes every time. I think it’s also the galactic empire place and I have got Ed Kohler in San Jose at the Video on the Net conference, live via Skype. We have also got the TalkShoe guys joining us live as we record this. So, welcome everyone on TalkShoe. Hey Ed, how is it going out there?

Ed Kohler: Its going well, a lot going on out here.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, what was the deal today resolve, I read a little bit on the Technology Evangelist website about some of the stuff that was going on, I like to touch on that and I know that there is little bit more blogging stuff going on today, tell us little bit about the blogging?

Ed Kohler: OK, the afternoon actually is when a lot of the blogging stuff was, probably there are couple of “A” list bloggers in town here including Robert Scoble and Michael Errington from TechCrunch and Scobleizer not respectively, but you can figure that out. They sat down talk to each other and had interesting conversation. One of the things they talked about is it was supposed to be a thing about video and where video is going as far as blogging goes and I would say Scoble jumped into this stuff in a big-big way with Podtech.net and he is actually created hundreds of videos just in the short time he has been doing this show and he records like at least one a day, he just cranking that stuff out. Errington, he can’t quite figure out the value in doing that, because of the time commitment involved in creating video. He says that he can create a post for a site in 20 to 30 minutes, which I believe, you look at the type of stuff he does, he has given sites a pretty quick look in a very short analysis, he is not spending time really getting intimate with it, but obviously, its something his audience like so, that is not a criticism in anyway, its just the format that he has chosen that’s a very good formula for him.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well yeah, but there are two ways to go about that, one is the highly produced content be at blog posts or video or audio, in any medium and one is kind of that. The other approach which is just get it out there and do whatever, whatever. I tend to lean towards the highly produced content, because I think its more dynamic, its more ca-, the audience can get into a little bit more than just the hour long drone of nothing, but I understand the value of both. What’s their argument for not, other than time, for not producing, actually producing it, just kind of throwing it up there?

Ed Kohler: Well, I think it’s a matter of time and skill. Where Scoble is doing a lot of it himself, its just the way that’s the format they have chosen. Errington describes Scoble’s video content as basically being like a library, where he is creating like a historical record of companies, but it’s not something where he just has to watch interviews with CEO’s in latest company on the blog. So, it is interesting content from a historical perspective, I sure it will be, because some of those companies are going to take off.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, my big gripe with stuff like that is that I don’t have any issue with him just posting the content as is without editing, that’s fine, but if I am looking for something in particular, if I have a specific object that I am trying to get to topic and its an hour and half interview and I don’t have chapter marks, I don’t have any time code, it really annoys me, because now, if I want to listen this five minutes snippet, I have to listen to this hour and half thing, I think that we as a video casting and podcasting community, we have to start getting used to the idea of doing the little bit of post-production in adding at the very least chapter marks into the video and even if it’s a progressive download, just put those in there, so I can find the content, so I don’t have to scroll through that in iTunes or Democracy or whatever it is, that’s been my biggest gripe so far. Frankly, I am guilty of it too, I haven’t spent the time to really make that go, but I personally think that’s important.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I agree and I think if you ask Scoble about an interview that he has done, he could give you some highlights from that, that could be the video stuff that he describes this be in highlights, even hour long interview, it’s not necessarily all going to be good.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Right.

Ed Kohler: But, it takes work to figure out what’s worth keeping and may be just should be in a different format and stuff, but one of my bigger gripes is with video on the web is there is no easy way to clip and sight video the way you can with the blog post, so in the blog post, I can just by highlighting a paragraph of a blog I can right click on it and automatically create a new post that’s built off of that one paragraph that I thought was interesting or worth commenting on, but if the same paragraph appeared with in an hour long video on Scoble’s site, how am I supposed to reference it, I have to transcribe it and then talk to tell people go there download the file, go to 22 minutes into it and now listen to this paragraph I was talking about, so its not, I think that’s one of the challenges the video as that is, its not very easy to sight, so people who are creating actually what is interesting content it just hard for people giving credit for it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I think we need some sort of, I think there are two big forms of video online right now with the distribution method, one is flash, we see a lot of embedded flash and the other is, progressive down or actually just to download and play through iTunes or Democracy or whatnot. I think someone needs to develop a flash player that allows you to basically set an in and out point and even share that very-very easily. So, you can say, “from here-to-here, its why I am interested” and just not make it over techie just click a little point that they start here end here and then its says OK, we will email this URL to your friend and they can play just that clip and I haven’t really seen a whole lot of that out there. I saw something it was close to that in Google Video, you can add the time markers in the URL, but it needs to be integrated into the player as for that.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, they should be allow to grab that information, more like how Google Maps works, where you could say I want to hyperlink to this exact map that I created here, whatever format it happens to be and wherever zoom level and everything that you have created , but people come back to that exact same state in video the way you can use Google Maps.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Exactly and then progressive download is going to be, I don’t know how to fix the progressive download problem or direct download, because you download the clip and then what, how do you tell someone and actually the guys, I know the guys from Participatory Culture, I never say all right, are working on something like that with the share feature, but I don’t know if they are working on that direct from here-to-here type thing, but I think that would be a very powerful feature.

Ed Kohler: Oh yeah, definitely.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, what else did you see at the conference today, what were the hot topics?

Ed Kohler: Well, I think one of the things that’s very hot out here is Neokast, which if people who have been reading Technology Evangelist for a while, maybe saw the video we did about Neokast, may be two weeks ago.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, I'll put that in the show notes.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, they are out here and have tiny little booth and I think they pretty much have the whole team out here, they are about five guys and they are being inundated with people at their booth, I think they are getting the most traffic of anyone there, basically a swam around them and one challenge is that they are stuck in the middle of this area of booths and they really should move their booth to different area, so more people can get around it, because its just little congested, so but they are getting a lot of interesting conversations going and lot of interest from the businesses who see the value and what they are doing and also from non-profits, who are seeing opportunity there as well.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well lets backup a little bit and describe what Neokast is?

Ed Kohler: Neokast is peer-to-peer streaming system for live streaming, so if you are creating content and you want a live content, if you want to push that out to a large community, you are going to have a lot of issues with that generally, because its going to cause more and more strain on your resources as more and more people hop on that stream. But, with Neokast they have created a peering system, so as more people hop on the stream you are actually getting some of that content from other people who already have it, so there is only a slight delay in it, I think they said it was about 8 seconds or something, so I would call that live. So, its new stuff and its really cool and their opportunity is to use this in large network situations, such as CNN could have a live stream of it, or C-Span could use it for something like that. Down to... they mentioned a day that a company had two guys where is it non-profit in Vancouver, a couple of people hop on motorcycles and come down to San Francisco to check this out, because they read Bob Cringely’s article about this on Sunday and today they are here on motorcycle in down the Pacific Cost highway.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, I think the big deal about that, I remember back in the day where was that Victoria's Secret, the live webcast that broadcast.com did and it just took down their servers and that’s always been part of the issue with live broadcasts is that you have to go back to the originating server, that was never really a good way to peer that and I think that’s part of what makes Neokast so cool, but now if you got something as little as T1 line, you can do a live broadcast to millions of people and even I mean depending upon your bandwidth, even up to High-Def quality and I think that’s just amazing that you can do that and then share that among the peers and that of course is assuming that the ISP is not going to block that traffic, because they are not going to like that too much.

Ed Kohler: Right and then there are some challenges there because people their upload bandwidth is generally not nearly on-level as their download bandwidth, so people can share what they can share, but its not 1 to 1 by any means and just another thing happened this afternoon, there is a interesting ego blogging going on from the stage where we had a Steve Garfield, Michael Errington, Robert Scoble, Jeff Pulver and Andy Abramson who are all pretty big-wig bloggers, they all have large followings, they are all somewhat different in the stuff that interests them, but it was funny because Pulver, he brought up that in the lead up to the VON conference, he started receiving emails from PR people that said “Hey, Jeff are you going to be at VON Spring?” “Do you know who I am?”, its his freaking conference, so he was talking about how it’s a real peeve to receive such untargeted email from PR people and then we had Scoble talked about how he is recently been blogging about how his mother been dying and received phone calls from PR people and from his perspective he thinks that PR people should be reading his blog and before they contact him, be current on what’s going on in his life, they are interesting perspectives and I think a really good PR person would probably do that, even a marginally good PR person would not do what was happening to Jeff Pulver, but it would take someone who has a personal relationship to really understand how Scoble operates there, but Errington he just thought that was just of bunch of crap and that people take information wherever he get it from, you don't owe these PR people anything, they just delete it if you don’t like it and move on, but you don’t have responsibility to deal with every email you get from PR person, so he just brushes them off, I guess.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Anything else happened in the conference today or was that the highlight of the show, the blogging debates?

Ed Kohler: The one another thing that was going on was there were some thingsin the morning about how, there are some video sites they are trying to create like niche Video Sites where maybe its around travel or there is one of the most snowboarding called Snowvision, the travel one is called Travelistic. The company that’s doing those, they have plans to do about 24 of these sites and its interesting concept because people do have a lot of passion about various subjects like that, but they also seem to realize that it will take forever to build up a decent amount of user generated content for something like that, so their licensing content to seed the site and overtime I think they probably would prefer not to pay for that, may be something like they can help them get it started and also aggregating content from other sites, as they can.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Cool.

Ed Kohler: So, I think it’s an interesting niche.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely, all right Ed, thank you so much for your time today I believe is tomorrow the last day of the conference.

Ed Kohler: Yes, it is.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, then we will check in with you one more time tomorrow evening at 9.00 eastern and 8.00 central, we will do another podcast for those who want to join us on talkshoe.com and we thank you so much for your time and have fun in beautiful California.

Ed Kohler: I will try, after I get in a run before I go to the party tonight.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Oh, I should to the same thing. All right, we will talk to you tomorrow.

Ed Kohler: All right, see you.